Noncompositional

Part of my Chinese class involves translation of short paragraphs from English into Chinese. The paragraphs are in the workbook that accompanies this textbook). Normally they are very good exercises, and the paragraphs are written in a way to make you think about how to use your relatively limited skills in Chinese to render a good translation. But sometimes they do something that’s…well, a little wrong. Below is one of the paragraphs that we translated in class today:

Recently, there has been more news on students bringing guns to school and threatening their teachers and classmates. Parents not only blame the school for not being able to educate children well, but also blame the media for having a bad influence on their children. However, many parents have never thought that they themselves are mostly responsible for their children’s behavior.

The interesting part is the last clause, that they themselves are mostly responsible for their children’s behavior. A student might have at least two problems at this point. One is that the book has not introduced a way to express the idea of being responsible. Instead there is a way to express take responsibility (for X). Unfortunately, the student might not be sure that there was any clear way to modify “responsibility” except for perhaps 負最大的責任 ‘bear the biggest responsibility’ (note: I’m not sure if this means the right thing, though it’s commonly attested on Google).

But another, even bigger potential problem is that the sentence doesn’t really make sense in the context of the paragraph. Why? Consider the meaning of X is mostly responsible for Y. The first meaning that comes to my mind is “most of X’s responsibility is Y.” For instance, Drum majors are mostly responsible for knowing the music of the ensemble and conducting it appropriately. I don’t think the idea of the sentence above is that most of a parent’s responsibility is taken up by taking care of how their children behave.

Okay, maybe there’s another interpretation. “Parents are the strongest determiner of their children’s behavior.” Unfortunately, this is also wrong. It would be similar to “global warming is responsible for an increase in piracy,” which is metaphorical in English and not literally translatable into Chinese. It’s not an unreasonable thing to say about parenting, but again, not really what I think the overall point of the paragraph is.

The solution? Change mostly to most. Then you get the assertion that parents should take most of the responsibility for their children’s behavior. Of course the first problem, of how to translate the sentence, is still an issue. Our teacher’s version was 父母最應該為孩子的行為負責. Literally, this is “parents most ought to take responsibility for their children’s behavior.” The “most ought to” is not something that I would have expected to be grammatical; I suspect I could also render it as “parents have the highest degree of being-obligated-to-take-responsibility-hood.”

(PS, my translation was a bit looser: 對孩子的行為來說,父母的責任/影響最大 “as far as children’s behavior goes, their parents have the greatest responsibility” (or “influence”, if you prefer the other reading.)